updated 05:12 pm EST, Thu November 14, 2013

One of five Kotaku PS4s, some retail establishments stricken by limited failures

Some early PlayStation 4 owners are complaining about HDMI and display issues. Among the notable infant failures, or dead-on-arrival units, are one to gaming publication Kotaku, one to gaming website IGN, and several reports gathered by Electronista from demonstration units shipped to retail stores.

Another claim from Taco Bell contest winner and Reddit member "Arogon," who won a PS4 said that when turned his console on, "it just sits there pulsing blue. As far as I can tell, it is supposed to turn white but it isn't doing that. There is no signal on my TV either."

Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo noted that "the first retail unit that Sony provided me failed to work when I plugged it into a TV in [the] office. A colleague and I were able to compare it to a second PS4 that did work and we found that the issue was rather simple: the bad unit had a faulty HDMI jack that we couldn't fully plug an HDMI cable into." The other four units the website have tested all worked fine.

IGN wrote that it had seen the same issue that Totilo and "Arogon" saw. The gaming site claimed that "ours stopped working the morning after we updated to version 1.50. Furthermore, IGN tried a wide variety of methods to correct the issue: new HDMI cables, new inputs, new TV, putting a disc into the system, connecting it to and from the Internet, and, of course, holding down the power button during boot-up for seven seconds to try to reset things. Nothing worked. Oddly enough, we tried adding light pressure to the top of console and it briefly flickered a few active home menu images on the television."

A Virginia Target store that Electronista spoke with confirmed the problem with its demonstration station. "We got a retail boxed unit for the station, plugged it in, followed the directions, and nada," the department manager told us. "Sony told us to box it up and send it back. I really hope that this isn't going to be a problem with the ones we have for customers." Upon further conversation, three out of nine Target retail stores close to the store we initially contacted were also affected by the HDMI issue.

Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios chief Shuhei Yoshida said on Twitter that users should "be assured we are investigating reported PS4 issues." He added that "The number is very small compared to shipped, we believe they are isolated incidents."